


The Littlest Thing Holds Up The World (and the sun is just her smile)

by MaxKowarth



Series: Sisters Of the Unexplained [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), The Omega Factor (TV), UNIT: the New Series (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Deductions, Established Relationship, F/F, Jealousy, Lesbian Sex, Misunderstandings, Paranoia, Saving the World, Useless Lesbians, leaping to conclusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24594739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaxKowarth/pseuds/MaxKowarth
Summary: After years of being more than friends Anne Reynolds finally accepts that she can deal with a long distance relationship with Kate Stewart.Even if she is attracted to Osgood that doesn't mean anything.Until one dinner and the night that leaves all three of them on a knife edge...
Relationships: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart/Anne Reynolds (The Omega Factor), Kate Lethbridge-Stewart/Petronella Osgood, Petronella Osgood/Anne Reynolds (The Omega Factor)
Series: Sisters Of the Unexplained [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1495040
Kudos: 6





	The Littlest Thing Holds Up The World (and the sun is just her smile)

It was somewhere past 4am when Anne realised she was alone in bed.  
With Kate Stewart as your girlfriend she had to admit that this was not an unusual experience but the night before had seemed to go so well.  
Osgood had stayed after dinner and Anne was delighted at their mutual love of film. Delighted further, to share something with her girlfriend's protégé that Kate herself did not. Secretly pleased of the attention from the shy brilliant young woman who usually hid in her mentor's shadow.

Anne threw a robe around herself and slunk downstairs. The kitchen light was on and she blinked in surprise that her beloved had not left the house in order to save the world.  
Kate was sat with Osgood at the kitchen table, their eye line alternating between a laptop and a projection that fit neatly across the steel splash back of the Aga.  
Anne didn't take in any of the whispered conversation between the two women. The tone was enough to know that they once more stood as the barrier between the mundane and the apocalyptic.

She watched them for a moment, not daring to interrupt.  
And that was when she saw it.  
It was the littlest, most inconsequential thing, but she felt her whole world shift under her.

Kate had placed her hand over Osgood's on the mouse. Then she raised the hand all save for the tip of her middle finger. This contact stroked back, down the younger woman's finger, over the back of her hand, to become the bridgehead of a reassuring grasp of Osgood's wrist.  
Anne blanched and took a step back into the shadows of the lounge. It was so simple a touch and yet one inextricably linked with intimacy with her girlfriend.

She felt her feet moving and without noticing found herself closing the bathroom door and leaning heavily against it before daring to breathe again.  
Throughout her escape her mind flashed back over the previous times she had felt that grip. From the conference room floor, the art gallery, the Edinburgh Festival gala to the stairs just outside this very door.

It was stupid. It was nothing. Anne opened her eyes and stared at the bathroom, trying to ground herself in the ordinary world. But she was a scientist, an investigator. And suddenly she was in a room full of clues.  
A pair of boxer shorts decorated in question marks lay on the edge of the laundry basket. The shower stood unused. The mat in front of the sink was askew.  
Anne's mind turned over even as she unconsciously bent to straighten the mat. Osgood's shorts made sense, she had come to freshen up and change into pyjamas while Anne had done the dishes.  
She was surprised at the haphazard nature of the placement, unfairly expecting Osgood to be neater with her soiled clothes. Neater than Kate ever was, anyway.

Anne straightened and looked at herself in the mirror. There was a smudge against the glass just below centre. She reached to clean it before stopping and taking a step back. There was a lesser smudge to the left of the mirror where it met the tiles.  
Anne blinked, her analytical mind filling the space in front of her as if it had been the projection downstairs. She could determine from the spacing that the central smudge was Osgood's forehead, the left one her palm. Bent over the sink, sweating enough to leave a mark she pictured her darling Kate holding the younger woman there. One hand inside those ridiculous boxer shorts making the brunette sweat and stifle her moans with a bitten lip.  
It was no great leap for her imagination to place Kate’s hand over the one on the mirror. That strong middle digit trailing back to Osgood's wrist. The grip there was coinciding with a powerful, intimate and explosive orgasm as it so often had for Anne.  
She staggered back, folding herself down on the toilet seat. Her reflection mocked her now the smudge obscured her eye line, leaving her a distorted blank with tumultuous red hair.

How long, she wondered. How long had Kate and Osgood been a thing? They had always been close, she could see that now.  
She rationalised that this could not be the first time. They had known that anything they did would go unheard by her in the kitchen.  
Unless they were hoping to be caught, Kate certainly entertained that fetish. Perhaps it was an adrenaline thing?  
Anne put her face in her hands. The shock had passed and now turned to anger. How dare they? How dare they lead her on, carry on behind her back? We're they laughing at her all the time? We're all those urgent meetings and late nights 'in the lab' just excuses?  
How had she not realised before, was she that blinded by her emotions that her subconscious had avoided the very thought, scared of loosing Kate?  
Anne wiped her eyes on the back of her sleeve and drew a deep breath. Anger gave way to guilt. Maybe she was the interloper. The two women had known each other long before Anne had returned to Kate's life. Oh god, was she the other woman? Did that make her crush on Osgood better or worse?  
Hells teeth, Kate knew about the crush! What if all this was her asserting herself. Was Kate that insecure?  
Anne returned to bed. The faint green glow from the clock told her that only minutes had passed since she left the room.  
She lay on her back and stared at the roof, surrounded by a life together of which she was no longer certain. 

\--  
Dr Anne Reynolds opened her eyes to the bleary smudge of 8.57am on the bedside alarm. She urgently shuffled her limbs for a moment before a calming, delicate hand pressed on her shoulder and a honeyed whisper stilled her.  
“It’s still Sunday.” Director Kate Stewart reassured her. “If you want to thrash about like that why don’t you lay back and let me give you a reason?” The hand circled her shoulder, pushing her back in line with the suggestion and Anne smiled as her girlfriend’s grin swam into view.  
“Promises, promises.” Anne challenged. Kate’s eyes narrowed. Despite the wicked glint in her eye she was on a mission and shortly her blonde bob disappeared under the covers.

It took seconds for those beautifully talented fingers to make the skin of her thighs scream with need and Anne shuffled to give Kate all the access she required. Lips pressed against her knee and moved proximal to her abdomen.  
Anne whimpered and the contact ceased with a muffled shush.  
“Keep quiet, we have company, remember?” Kate ordered.  
In the usual run of their relationship Anne would find so much of that a turn on: being ordered, being told to hold back, and knowing that anyone could catch them.

But today the reminder jolted Anne back to the small hours like an ice bucket challenge. She felt her face fall and the sinking feeling in her stomach had nothing to do with where Kate had forced her tongue.  
To make matters worse Kate, oblivious to the early morning crisis, mistook Anne’s shiver for pleasure. With her cues all wrong she grasped her girlfriends hand, ran a finger over the back and then encircled her wrist. Fully intending to guide that hand to her hair, as they had done so many times before.  
Anne Reynolds sat bolt upright. Her knee connected with Kate’s ribs and elicited an anguished, if muffled cry.  
Kate flinched away, toppled from the end of the king sized bed and drew the duvet with her. She crashed against the chest of drawers with an almighty crunch, dislodging a carefully balanced pile of textbooks which narrowly missed her as they fell.  
The bedroom door flung wide as Osgood, in only her PJ bottoms, ran in fully alert.

Time stood still for Anne, a proper ‘Matrix’ moment of utter despair. Her naked girlfriend crumpled on the floor looking pained and heartbroken at an inexplicable rejection.  
Her girlfriend’s delectable head of projects, naked from the waist up with long hair spilling around her, stock still in the doorway. Her mouth gaped and Anne could make out a distinct bruise on her collarbone.  
Anne herself, nude, legs drawn up to her chest and coated in sheen of perspiration that made her seem in soft focus. She swore bitterly and rushed to lock herself in the bathroom before Osgood could finish asking if everything were alright.

\--  
Kate had tried a gentle, if confused whispering at the bathroom door. She escalated to a more strident knock then decided to get dressed before her nerves got the better of her and she took up Osgood’s offer to open it.  
She tried hard not to glow with pride as her best friend unbolted the bathroom with two pocket magnets and a flick of her wrist. The elder blonde absolutely did not add that information to her fantasies about being caught ‘in flagrante delicto’.  
Osgood swallowed and whispered that she was going to put the kettle on. She slipped past with a consoling hand to Kate’s forearm which elicited a reassuring smile.

Kate Stewart; Chief Scientific Officer of UNIT UK, daughter of General Sir Alistair Lethbridge Stewart, veteran of conflicts that the planet was never meant to hear about drew a calming breath and placed her hand on the door. Right now she could handle a hoard of W’rath or even her children’s arguing better than she felt prepared to confront the frightened woman that lay beyond.

“Anne?” Kate purred. She had unconsciously engaged her diplomacy mode, speaking firmly but softly. It lasted all of a second once the door closed behind her. Kate scanned the room almost professionally as if her girlfriend were a hostage. The laundry basket lay smashed at her feet, its contents flung about the room. A towel hung over the razor light, hiding the mirror from the room.  
Anne was a curled sobbing mess in the bottom of the shower.

Kate valiantly forced herself not to weep, picking her way forensically to her girlfriend, easing open the shower door and kneeling in front of her. She waited for a response from the soft cooing she was making, never noticing she stopped using Anne’s name and started cycling through pet names.  
“Anne? Darling? Please look at me sweetheart. I don’t know what’s happened, I want to know, I want to be near you my love. Anne, my angel, please, it’s only me. It’s your Kate.” She reached a tentative hand out towards her girlfriend’s wrist.  
At the least she elicited a response as Anne snatched her hand away. Kate put the evidence together without access to all the data and immediately came to the wrong conclusion.

“Dear god Anne, are you alright? Is it broken? I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t mean to hurt you”  
Anne Reynolds made a noise midway between bitter despair and ironic bark. Kate understood that her hypothesis had been wildly inaccurate. She regrouped with a shuffle of her weight from her ankles where the squat was sending them to sleep.  
“Do you need a medic, Dr Reynolds?” she kept her voice light, teasing, a parody of her command voice that usually made her lover grin.  
“Fuck off” Anne wept. Kate stood, aghast.  
“I… we…” she stopped, her chest feeling tight as she realised she was going to lose the battle in hiding her tears. “I’ll lay on some tea.” She reported flatly and left the room.

\--  
The bedside clock glowed 10.43am as Anne zipped up her bag and searched the bedside table for anything else she would have to take with her. Her hand paused over the photo frame. Her shadow obscured her own smiling features in the high Spanish summer. In the photo Kate’s arms were around the shoulders of her and Beth. She let it be and picked up her bags, heaving them from the bed and down to the hall.  
At least that had been the plan. Osgood waited at the bottom of the stairs. The two women stopped in a wide eyed standoff. The younger brunette flicked her eyes to the left in warning. Neither of them moved. 

“Kate? I’m just going to get my other inhaler, will you be alright?”  
Anne couldn’t hear the reply but judging by the look on Osgood’s face it was not a polite one.  
Osgood advanced up the stairs, making no move toward the spare room. Instead she placed a firm palm on Anne’s chest and persuaded back to her room. She said nothing until the door closed.

“Dr Reynolds, Anne. It’s not my place to comment on your relationships or decisions. I’m, I’m really not the person who should be mediating. But trust me, the very last thing you should be thinking of doing at this minute is running out.” She pointed at the bags on the bed.  
“You only have another week before you have to return to Edinburgh anyway, I know, but if you go now you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of your life.”  
Anne blinked. “Did... did you just Casablanca me?”  
Osgood blushed. “I… well yes. No one ever notices, usually. And Kate is hardly Victor, no matter how Ilsa you are but the sentiment is utterly the right one. You. Must not. Go” she punctuated this last with sharp points in the air.  
Anne opened her mouth, wracked with guilt for being attracted to the woman who destroyed her life. The mouth closed again without comment.  
“And if I can’t appeal to your sense of honour then I’m going to have to beg” Osgood actually got on her knees and took a breath. Anne tried not to imagine her proposing. “Please Anne. If not for your sake, mine. If you break Kate’s heart she’ll be impossible. And Kate being impossible is a global catastrophe in the making. Just talk to her, for the sake of the world!”

Anne laughed despite herself. Osgood looked panicked, edging towards utter terror and that only made Anne laugh harder. She was still laughing when she heard the earnest brunette apologise the instant before she slapped her across the face.  
For the second time that morning the world stood still. Anne’s eyes went wide. She understood that she had become hysterical in the same instant that she saw Kate in the doorway, responding to the noise. Without context she was witnessing her girlfriend being assaulted.  
“Osgood, stand down!” she roared in her ‘parade ground’ voice. There was no emotional pause on events this time, everything stopped for real. The three women stared at each other, breathing hard. All red eyed with a mixture of adrenaline, exhaustion and fear.  
Osgood’s hand dropped to her side. Kate’s hands clenched and flexed in time to her racing heart. Anne found herself whispering a prayer that she didn’t believe in.

\--  
The clock on the microwave read 03:33. This of course, meant absolutely nothing as the LCD display had been damaged during a dinner party with Gordy and his sister trying to impress their mother’s new girlfriend.  
The atmosphere in the kitchen was thick with the unsaid. Osgood was reminded of the world shaping nuclear standoff in the Black Archive. For her own part she felt the result of this negotiation would be just as critical to the future of life on Earth.  
Since they had all sat at the table Osgood had been trying to put together all the available data to form a concrete hypothesis as to the events of the last 12 hours. She knew crucial data was missing from her evaluation at this stage but daren’t speculate. Anne could have been replaced with a parallel universe duplicate. 

It could be a Zygon cell operating a deep cover assault to destabilise UNIT by demoralising the legendary Kate Stewart.  
Except she knew Dr Anne Reynolds was entirely genuine. She had qualifications in Physics, Psychology, parapsychology, languages, theology and a dozen related disciplines. Was published in peer reviewed journals since the early 80s and ran Department 7 out of Edinburgh University.  
Kate had been seconded to the city for two years out of Dolerite Base. Neither of them said anything but there were tertiary factors to suggest this was a root cause of her divorce. Perhaps Anne had been too.  
Osgood knew all of this because the morning after Kate returned from the midlands conference, beaming and happier than Os had ever seen her inside work, Osgood had immediately researched the woman who could make her idol smile as much as she did. It only took 4 minutes to discover that Anne made Os smile too.

She was delighted when she learned that Kate had been texting the woman and happily teased her boss about finding someone she didn’t have to keep secret.  
The first she knew how serious Kate was about Anne had been the Friday night that the elder blonde turned down an offer of dinner on the embankment. Osgood had bitten her lip and taken a slow breathe before turning on her smile as Kate explained Anne was visiting this weekend and they already had reservations.  
And now the two women, whose very name could cause the other to glow as bright as Validium, were glaring across the kitchen table at each other.  
Osgood reached for her inhaler and stood staring at the cap. She clutched without using it and cleared her throat.

\--  
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have some questions?” Osgood started. The two women turned toward her with equally hostile glances. Os ignored them and continued speaking. “I’d just like to go over the timeline from my point of view, feel free to chip in if I miss anything.”  
Osgood paced the kitchen as she went over events like a particularly attractive young Miss Marple: meeting Anne at the Tower and being invited to dinner by Kate. She noted the cheeky smile that Kate had flashed Anne at the time but there was neither confirmation nor denial forthcoming. She ran through the meal, the discussion, the feather light touch of Anne removing the clip that held Os’s hair up, Anne volunteering to wash up so that Kate and Os could go change. The bottle of wine they opened in front of the TV and the warm teasing the three of them had shared before bed.  
It wasn’t until Osgood began reciting the words she heard screamed through the walls after they had said goodnight that Kate finally spoke, quietly asking her to skip over that bit. She caught Anne’s eye, reading her mind that Os not only knew what Anne liked but had a rather graphic memory if she needed an instruction manual.

Anne blushed for an instant but then Osgood skipped ahead to the phone call at 3.30am that forced her to bring her laptop downstairs; Kate joining her by 4, the tense and delicate negotiation with the Patagonians, The return to bed and her need to drain the adrenaline from her system. Then being woken by Anne’s whimpering followed by Kate falling from bed.  
“So you see I’m rather at a loss as to when whatever happened actually happened?” Osgood finally ran out of steam and succumbed to the inhaler.  
“You’re timeline is a little out, I think.” Anne told her in the smallest of voices. Kate encouraged her to go on, uncertain as to what Osgood could have missed. “What about the events in the bathroom, the changing?” Anne suggested.  
Osgood frowned. “How did you know I had a panic attack?”  
“Well you left enough evidence... What? Sorry? Panic attack?” Anne was flummoxed. Kate was distraught. 

“Oh Os, why didn’t you say anything?” the blonde asked kindly.  
“Because then I’d have to explain what triggered it and I didn’t want to upset anyone and its childish really you know how these things are… no you probably don’t I don’t think either of you could ever have had a panic attack over seeing your best friend’s girlfriend’s racy knickers.”  
Anne went crimson. Kate failed to hide her grin behind her mug of lukewarm tea. Even if she had been successful, the raised eyebrow was a dead giveaway.  
“You… had a panic attack because of my French fancies?” Anne finally managed to find her voice.  
“I told you that you should have saved them for last night.” Kate muttered into the mug.  
“And Kate didn’t have sex with you over the sink?” Anne double checked.  
Kate nearly choked on the tea. Osgood dropped her inhaler, caught it before it hit the floor and began to stammer an apology that very nearly made things worse. “Never, I would never do something like that while you were here!”  
Kate slammed her mug to the table top. “She didn’t mention sex last night because the only sex I had was with my girlfriend.”

The room stopped once more. Anne and Kate looked at each other. The redhead sat back in the chair and stonily confessed. “I saw you at the laptop in the dead of night Kate. You did the hand thing.”  
Kate lowered her eyes and nodded.  
“The hand thing? Do you mean the Hypnobirthing therapy?” Osgood frowned. It was Kate’s turn to go crimson.

“The what?” Anne asked uncomfortably. Osgood raised her hands to demonstrate the passage of one hand over the back of another.  
“Hypnobirthing. It was supposed to be a relaxation exercise during breathing exercises before pregnancy but with a little investigation into pressure points I realised it could be adapted to keep my breathing steady during high pressure incidents. Kate is SO good at it that she only usually needs to stroke the hand the once then holds my wrist to check my pulse.” She tailed off as she caught the look Anne was giving Kate.  
Kate had the decency to look caught out.  
“So the first time you tried that on me you were try to calm me down?”  
“We were in the middle of the Birmingham International Conference Centre. I honestly was not trying to make you cream your pants.”  
Now it was Osgood’s turn to blink in confusion. The light dawned and the other two women watched a myriad of emotions flicker across her face in the instant before she fainted.

\--  
The bedside clock read 12:01 pm. Not that Osgood could read it. Her glasses we led atop the device and she lay between the concerned bodies of Kate and Anne in the middle of the bed. Os groaned.  
“Welcome back.” Kate’s warm voice coiled in her ear and she desperately tried not to show the effect it always had on her. Things were delicate enough as it was.  
“Where…”  
“You fainted. If Kate hadn’t caught you and brought you up to bed we might have needed the hospital.” Anne’s softer but no less affecting tones breathed in her other ear.  
“Bed?” Osgood frowned; even without her glasses she could tell her state of dress without looking. Slowly she realised she could tell those of the other two women.  
Osgood went crimson this time.


End file.
